Cuba's poet and freedom fighter

Jose Marti

Simple Verse of José Martí



I’m a sincere man
From where the palm grows,1
And before I die I want
To scatter my verses from my soul.

1 Cuba


My verse is from a clear green
And from a bright red.
My verse is a wounded stag
That seeks shelter in the woods.


I have seen the injured eagle
Fly to the serene blue
And kill in its lair
The poisonous viper.


I come from all places
And to all places I go.
I am art inside the arts;
And in the woods, the woods.


The leopard has a pelt
In the dry, dun forest.
I have more than the leopard,
For I have a good friend.


I grow a white rose
In June as in January
For the true friend
Who gives me his honest hand.


And for the cruel who tear out
The heart that gives me life,
I don’t grow stinging nettles;
I grow a white rose.


I want when I die --
No homeland, but no master --2
To have in my tomb a sprig
Of flowers and a flag.

2 Expatriate of Cuba, but free from Spain’s tyranny.


Don’t put me in the dark
To die like a traitor.
I am good, and as good,
I will die facing the sun.


Sometimes when I’m happy
Like a simple schoolboy,
I think of the yellow canary
That has such black eyes.3

3 Symbolic reference to Spain (yellow) and the evil (black) that it has caused.


With the earth’s poor,
My die is cast.
The mountain stream
Pleases more than the sea.


I trembled once at the fence
At the vineyard’s entrance
When the foreign queen-brute
Bit my daughter’s brow.


If you see a mountain of spray,
It’s my verse you see;
My verse is a mountain,
And an open fan of feathers.


These verses are my translation, although I have to credit Federico Rodriguez who stimulated me to do the translations and gave me suggestions on tone and diction.  They have not been published before now.  Jose Marti for Cubans is like Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson or Patrick Henry or all three combined for Americans because Marti articulated the hopes and desires of the Cubans.  Marti is a hero to both expatriates in Miami and ironically to Fidelistas, although I doubt Marti would think highly of a totalitarian state, nor would he be tolerated there.  If Jose Marti were alive today, he would probably be imprisoned in Cuba for speaking and writing against the oppressive state.
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